When visitors follow a link to a non-existing page, they will be presented with an edit box by default.

When users edit the URL by hand, however, they can use the normal browse action and visit a non-existing page. When a non-existing page is requested, Oddmuse will display the default text for new pages. This invites users to create missing pages.

If you are using Oddmuse to create a static-looking site, then you don’t want visitors to mess with the URL by hand or create new pages just like that. One way to discourage this, is to redirect all requests for a non-existing page to a “Not Found” page. This is disabled by default. If you want to enable it, you need to set the NotFoundPg option to a page name.

It is important to note that this only affects users following a link to a non-existing page. This doesn’t happen very often, since Oddmuse will automatically create an edit link to non-existing pages.

Visitors will only see the “Not Found” page if they do one of the following:

Modify the URL by hand, creating a request for a non-existing page.

Following a link to a non-existing page from another site to your wiki.

Following a link to a username from RecentChanges or from the bottom of a page.

If you are using Oddmuse to create a static-looking site, the links to username pages will probably not be a problem anyway: Either you have a limited number of authors and they all have existing pages, or you hide RecentChanges and the footer from your visitors.

This can be set to the name of a page to be shown to user that arrive at the wiki via a link that points to a non-existing page. Usually the wiki generates edit links for these situations. The only exceptions are the list of usernames on the list of recent changes and the list of recent visitors. See Rc Action and Visitors Action.

You could set this option to “DoesNotExist” and on the the DoesNotExist page, you could say: “This page does not exist, yet.”

Note that if you set $NotFoundPg, and your RecentChanges page does not exist yet, then people clicking on the RecentChanges link will see your not-found page instead of the list of recent changes! To solve the problem, create the RecentChanges page before you set $NotFoundPg, or create it afterwards by manually calling the Rc Action and clicking on Edit text of this page.